Solomon's Song (12 page)

‘Shall we go in?’ Mary invites and turns to lead the way into the mansion. ‘Cook has a baron of beef fresh from the roasting oven, I feel sure a big man like you has a healthy appetite.’

*

A week after the Dutchman’s arrival Hawk arrives home shortly after sunset and, stopping only to tell Mrs Briggs he will take a light supper in his study, goes straight to the wing of the house he occupies. He is weary and has a light cold and thinks to take a bath and then read awhile before going to bed. But Mary sends a maid to ask him if he’ll have dinner with her, the servant girl adding that Hinetitama is out for the evening.

Hawk thinks the invitation curious. It is the custom for both Mary and himself to dine alone after a journey. Mary is well aware of the rigours of a long coach ride and the accumulated weariness of constant travel over a period of several days. Hawk knows himself to be irritable and not inclined to favour company of any sort. He will catch up with Mary in the morning when she will drill him solidly for an hour, wanting to learn every detail of his business trip.

Hawk finds himself especially tired on this occasion. Normally he would have rested somewhat on the ferry from New Norfolk, but upon his arrival at the little river port he discovered the ferry had struck a docking pylon the previous night and sunk in six feet of river water. The captain, being reputed to have been in an advanced state of inebriation, was blamed for the accident.

Now his back ached from the Cobb and Co. coach ride, where, despite paying for two seats as was his usual custom, he’d been jammed in with too many other passengers, among them two stout ladies who seemed to spend the entire trip complaining about the mishap to the ferry and the added inconvenience of the coach, and on several occasions making pointed remarks that ’someone’ among them was taking twice the seating space he was entitled to.

‘Tell Miss Mary I am wearied from my journey and wish to bathe and be early to bed and will take supper alone in my study. You will give her my apologies and say that I will see her in the morning,’ he tells the maid. Then adds, ‘Can you remember all of that?’

The servant girl nods and does a poor imitation of a curtsy before taking her leave. Mary’s servants are not expected to be overformal in their behaviour, required only to show respect to their employers. ‘Had quite enough o’ all that bowing and scraping when I were a maid meself,’ Mary would say when she suspected a visitor expected a curtsy or a servant to stand to attention as they passed.

Hawk has removed his boots, socks and cravat and released his starched collar from its gold stud. His braces hang from his waist and his shirt cuffs are unlinked, when there is a sharp knock on the door followed immediately by Mary’s voice. ‘Hawk, I must talk to you! Will you not take tea with me tonight?’

‘Mama, I am greatly wearied from the journey, I beg to be excused.’

‘Are you decent?’ Mary’s voice now asks from behind the door.

Hawk sighs. ‘Mama, I have removed my boots and I daresay my feet stink to high heaven,’ he says, hoicking up his braces as he speaks.

Without further ado the door to his bed chamber is thrown open. ‘Hawk, I simply must talk to you!’ Mary repeats.

Hawk groans. ‘Mama, can’t it wait? I am dog-tired. Can we not talk at breakfast, after I am rested?’

‘No, it can’t!’ Mary snaps. ‘I would be most obliged if you’d take tea with me. Mrs Briggs will make you something light to eat, a little cold lamb and mustard pickles perhaps?’

Hawk realises that Mary will not be put off, that if he continues they will inevitably quarrel, an experience for which he has an even greater disinclination than his appearance at supper. ‘Mama, allow me to take a bath first,’ Hawk sighs wearily.

At the dinner table a thoroughly grumpy Hawk hears of the Dutchman’s arrival. Mary tells him that, together with his manservant, Isaac Blundstone, Teekleman has been given quarters at The Ship Inn.

Hawk shows his astonishment. ‘You welcomed him and gave him a place to stay?’

‘Well, yes, it seemed a proper thing to do, given the circumstances,’ Mary says, her lips pursed.

‘Proper thing? Proper thing to do! Whatever can you mean?’ Hawk cries.

‘Well, he’s Hinetitama’s friend, ain’t he?’

Hawk shakes his head, not believing what he’s heard. ‘Mama, what have you done!’

‘It were none of my doing, I swear it! He just come ‘ere out of the blue.’

Hawk looks at his mother, holding her eyes. ‘Don’t you look at me like that, Hawk Solomon,’ she shouts. ‘It don’t have nothing to do with me, ask her, she’ll tell yer what happened!’

Mary lowers her eyes, averting his gaze. She is not accustomed to explaining herself or of justifying her actions and he senses she feels vulnerable. ‘Mama, are you sure? Are you sure you didn’t have a hand in this?’

‘Course I am,’ Mary snorts indignantly. ‘Would I lie to you, me own flesh and blood?’

‘Good then, you won’t mind if I send him packing? I daresay a little more than two sovs will be needed this time, but I shall regard it as money well spent.’

Mary doesn’t react as Hawk expects she will, defending the Dutchman’s right to stay as long as her granddaughter wants him to remain, claiming that her love for Teekleman must be allowed to prevail. Instead she shrugs, her expression now completely noncommittal. ‘You must do what you think best, my dear, I have only waited until you returned.’ Then she adds quietly, ‘But if you must send him off, then don’t tell her, let her think he’s left of his own accord. Either way it will break her poor heart, but if she knows it’s you done it to her again, this time she will not forgive you.’

Hawk is immediately suspicious. It is an altogether too well-rehearsed reply. He senses Mary is at her most devious. She has the same ‘butter won’t melt in her mouth’ appearance as when she confronted the hapless Senior Detective O’Reilly in the mortuary and claimed Mr Sparrow’s headless body to be Tommo’s. It is at this precise moment that Hawk knows that Teekleman has been bribed in some manner he cannot hope to match. That money won’t buy him off. That, whatever the machinations involved in having the Dutchman return to her granddaughter, Mary has rendered Hawk powerless to prevent Teekleman from staying in Hobart.

She has not forbidden him to send the Dutchman packing, so he cannot chastise or even threaten to undermine her by admitting to David Solomon that they stole Ikey and Hannah’s Whitechapel fortune. Unless he should kill him, Teekleman will stay and marry Hinetitama. Mary will have her stallion and Hinetitama will be sacrificed as Mary’s willing mare.

Hawk is suddenly very angry. ‘Mother, you have done a terrible thing, you will destroy her life. She has Tommo’s cravings for the bottle, the Dutchman will bring Hinetitama down to his level.’

Mary has regained her calm and reaching for the tea pot she pours herself a second cup of tea. ‘I can’t imagine what yer talkin’ about. She ain’t touched a drop in almost two years and he came to dinner sober as a judge, his linen clean, dressed like Jones the grocer, neat as a new pin, and well spoken and polite throughout.’ She places the pot down and adds milk and sugar to her cup and commences to stir it, the teaspoon tinkling softly against the edge of the cup. ‘I admit he ain’t got the social standing I would have liked for the girl, but who are we to talk? We can’t help who we are then, can we? Him a foreigner, her a half-caste, you born black, me a cockney born poor as dirt and not much better than same.’

‘Mama, Teekleman is a gambler and a drunk, fer Godsakes!’

‘Well, we know all about that then, don’t we? Had one of those in the family before, haven’t we? Didn’t stop us loving him though, did it?’

‘Mama, that were Tommo, our own flesh and blood, it’s not the same.’

‘Oh? Why not? She’s in love with him, Hawk. You should see them two together. I’ve never seen her happier, singing the livelong day, carefree as a lark. She loves him all right, as much as we loved our Tommo.’

Hawk now sees that Mary will not be baited, that she is determined to keep her equilibrium, to stay calm. He tries one more time. ‘Mama, I told you how I found them in Wellington, he’ll ruin her.’

‘People change. He’s been here a week and he hasn’t touched a drop as far as I know, she’s been with him most of the time and except for t’night he’s had tea with us every day.’ Mary smiles. ‘Funny to hear his voice, takes me back, just like me old dad’s, all them words pronounced wrong and “ja” this and “ja” that, like turning back the clock, Gawd forbid. I were suddenly a little girl again, tricking pennies from young men stepping out with their sweethearts in the Vauxhall Gardens.’

‘Christ Jesus!’ Hawk suddenly expostulates, then throwing down his napkin he kicks back his chair and leaves the table.

‘Ain’t you gunna say goodnight then?’ Mary calls after him. Hawk knows that he is finally defeated, that Iron Mary has won the day without shedding a single drop of family blood. He goes to bed furious and humiliated, but nevertheless determined to see Teekleman the next day.

*

The Dutchman proves to be quite a different proposition to the coward he paid off with two sovs and sent packing in Wellington. He is well dressed, just as Mary has described him, and has a definite air of confidence about him. He is shown into Teekleman’s rooms, the two best available at The Ship Inn, by a manservant who, despite a suit of new clothes and boots, has the appearance of a drunkard about him, perhaps an ex-fighter gone to early seed. His rubicund nose looks as though it has been rearranged several times in the past and his ears are tight little knots of flesh. The man is plainly not overacquainted with the duties of a manservant and fails to take Hawk’s hat and coat.

Hawk stoops noticeably to enter the room and Teekleman rises from the table he is seated at and where he has been playing a game of solitaire, the cards arranged in sequence on the table in front of him. Hawk’s memory goes back to Tommo, to his abiding obsession, how he couldn’t for a moment be parted from a deck of DeLarue and at every opportunity would finger them, handle them, splay and spread them as though they were an extension of his own body, which he supposes they eventually became.

‘Once a gambler always a gambler, eh, Teekleman?’ Hawk says, this opening remark intended to put the Dutchman on the defensive.

But Teekleman is not so easily disconcerted. He smiles and extends his hand. ‘Ja, it is goet we meet, Mr Solomon.’ He chuckles. ‘Last time was maybe not so goet I think.’

Hawk is forced to take his hand and is surprised at the firmness of Teekleman’s grip. ‘Now look here, Teekleman, I do not intend to beat about the bush. You are not welcome here,’ Hawk announces and then feels slightly embarrassed at how the words have come out. They sound overpompous, like a retired colonel from the Indian Army. ‘So why don’t you piss off!’ he adds, attempting to leaven his statement with an addition of the vernacular.

Teekleman does not reply, but appears to look past Hawk, who now turns and sees that Blundstone is still standing at the door. ‘Ja sank you, Blundstone, you go now,’ the Dutchman says, waving the man out with a flick of his hand. He watches as Blundstone leaves, closing the door behind him. Hawk is fairly certain that one of the little pug’s cauliflower ears is well glued to the surface of the door.

‘If it’s a matter of compensation?’ Hawk now says to Teekleman.

‘Mr Solomon, I am here because I come myself.’ He points to the cards on the table. ‘It is just a game, I do not gamble no more, with the flats I am finish. I have goet job and I have now Hinetitama.’ He pauses and grins. ‘Is goet, ja?’

Hawk wants to smash his fist into the Dutchman’s face, he knows the bastard is lying. ‘Five hundred pounds and your passage out of here to anywhere you wish to go. Holland, America, you name it. All I require is that you never set foot in Tasmania again.’ He knows he is offering Teekleman a fortune, but he is disinclined to bargain and has made him an offer a man in Teekleman’s position would find almost impossible to refuse. The overlarge offer is also intended to assess whether, as he suspects, there may be another agenda and Mary has rendered the Dutchman bulletproof.

Teekleman whistles softly and appears to be thinking. ‘That is a lot of money, Mr Solomon.’ He looks slowly up at Hawk and shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says smiling, ‘I stay. I do not go.’

As with Hinetitama, Hawk’s fears seem to have been unfounded. Teekleman has been given a job as a tally clerk in the brewery and, soon thereafter, is promoted by Mary to foreman in charge of transportation, delivering to the pubs Tommo & Hawk ale, the beer most in demand from the Potato Factory. Mary has been careful to put him to work in an area isolated from Hawk’s day-to-day influence and it has to be said the Dutchman acquits himself well enough. Furthermore, he drinks only beer, which seems not to affect his sobriety in the least, only manifesting itself by the increasing size of his girth. Hinetitama, for her part, though besotted by the Dutchman, maintains her pledge.

The Hobart society is soon atwitter with the news of the romance, though the gossips are all in agreement that Mary has been forced to compromise and has come down in her expectations for her ‘dark little granddaughter’, the euphemism they have privately adopted for Hinetitama. They have neatly reversed the fact that Hinetitama has summarily rejected every island suitor, and now gleefully whisper that the island’s more mature bachelors and widowers have spurned Mary’s fortune and collectively rejected her granddaughter out of hand. This wildly improbable proposition is, of course, happily accepted and confirmed by the motley collection of males who have been sent packing.

Nevertheless, everybody who is anybody in the local society is waiting anxiously to be invited to the wedding. Mary has promised a desperate and frustrated Hawk that she will wait six months before the couple are joined in matrimony, his hope being that Teekleman will inevitably reveal his true colours. When time expires and the Dutchman proves his worth an impatient Mary announces the couple’s betrothal. Hawk now begs that the wedding be a modest affair and even suggests that it take place as a civil wedding.

Mary is appalled at this suggestion. ‘How can you deny me this?’ she castigates him. ‘Me, an old woman, what hasn’t much longer for this mortal coil! Who never had the pleasure of seeing Tommo joined and denied the same pleasure by yourself! I want this whole bleedin’ island to know me granddaughter is gettin’ married! I want guests t’come from the mainland and every publican and his wife on the island what sells our beer, all the workers, down to the most ‘umble, with their families and the nobs and the snobs and the true merinos, I want the lot, even the flamin’ governor!’